Extremely expensive, with no free trial and severely limited refund options. Capture of third-party messages requires rooting the device. No content filtering or Internet time control. Seeing all photos, contacts, and so on is awkward.

Bottom Line

Xnspy (for Android) capably monitors your child's Android device, but doesn't attempt to control it. Its price, though, isn't remotely in line with the competition.

You find a wide range of features in different parental control apps. Some focus mostly on control, limiting the child's screen time and blocking access to nasty sites. Others aim to monitor the child's activity without interfering, and possibly without even being noticed. Xnspy (for Android) definitely falls in the latter category, to the point where its presence is nearly undetectable.

This is by far the most expensive mobile parental control app I've encountered. For $149.99 per year, you get to monitor exactly one child on exactly one device. uKnowKids Premier costs $100 per year, but it lets you monitor social media activity for four children, as well as one Android and one iOS device for each child. Norton Family Parental Control (for Android), our Editors' Choice for Android parental control, goes for $49.99 per year and covers an unlimited number of children and devices.

I don't usually let pricing have a strong impact on a product's rating, but in this case I believe it significantly lowers Xnspy's value. This feeling is exacerbated by the lack of a free trial, and by the company's strict refund policies, which specifically deny refunds based on erroneous expectations. Many other conditions merit refunds from 30 percent to 70 percent of the purchase price, and no refunds are available after 10 days. No kidding!

While Xnspy (for iPhone) connects to the same online control console as the Android edition, it works completely differently. Real-time monitoring is only available on jailbroken devices. For safe, non-jailbroken devices, Xnspy slurps data from the device's iCloud backup. Read my review of the iPhone edition for details.

As the name suggests, this product is designed for spying (or, shall we say, monitoring) device use rather than control. The FAQ suggests that you could use to monitor employees using company-owned phones, which is unusual. I don't think I'd pay nearly $1,500 to monitor ten employees, though.

Do note that some of Xnspys features are only available on a rooted Android device. Rooting an Android is perhaps less dangerous than jailbreaking an iOS device, but I still don't recommend it. This review covers only features that are available without rooting the device.

Getting Started Once you've started your subscription, you'll have access to the all-important Xnspy online console. Initially you'll just see a list of your subscriptions, each of which has a link to associate that subscription to a specific device. Note that if at some point you need to switch the subscription to a different device, there's a $10 change fee.

Xnspy for non-jailbroken iOS devices works strictly through iCloud and doesn't require access to the phone (unless iCloud backup isn't configured properly). For Android coverage, you must install the app. To be fair, that's true of every Android parental control tool I've seen. If you want a true stealth installation, you should install the app before handing over the device.

A clear set of instructions walk you through the install process. This includes enabling installation of apps from unknown sources; be sure to turn that off when you're done. FamilyTime Premium (for Android) also requires you to enable unknown sources.

The app's internal name is SystemTask, and it has an Android logo, for a kind of security through obscurity. You're instructed to give it several sets of permissions, and to enter the activation code supplied with your subscription. It also needs Device Administrator powers, and it needs Usage Access as well. The company website calls it 100 percent undetectable, but that's not 100 percent true. There's no visible icon, true, but the app shows up in the lists for Device Administrator and Usage Access.

Toggle Features Once you've installed the app and associated it with the supplied activation code, the device should show up in the online console. Tap Settings to configure it.

Clicking Toggle Features displays a huge list of things that Xnspy can monitor, including Appointments, Internet History, Call History, Contacts, Location, and Installed Apps. It also captures SMS activity, photos, and videos.

However, as you scroll down you'll encounter a whole raft of logging options that only work if the device is rooted. Which ones they are isn't immediately evident. To see what features are actually available, visit the Android features page and click the button that shows the full list of features. All those marked with an asterisk (mostly third-party messaging apps) are not available.

Uploading media like videos and recorded phone calls could burn through your data plan, or run down the battery. You can configure Xnspy to only upload when on Wi-Fi, when charging, or both.

Add Watchlists The purpose of the three Watchlists is send you, the parent, a real-time alert when specific events occur. Note that this feature isn't available on a non-jailbroken iPhone, as there's no real-time data capture.

The Watchlist Words feature is simple. You add words to the list, perhaps too-private information like your home phone. Any time those words show up in a monitored data feed such as text messages, you get an alert.

As you might expect, any incoming or outgoing contact with someone on the Contacts Watchlist triggers an email alert. You can fill in any phone numbers, screen names, or email addresses you like. However, it's probably easier to just find the contact in the list reported by Xnspy and click the Watchlist button next to it. FamilyTime has a similar contact Watchlist. Norton and Qustodio Parental Control (for Android) go even farther, letting parents block calls and texts from unwanted contacts.

Xnspy tracks your child's location history on a map that you can view in the online console. You can also define any number of locations for geofencing. As with FamilyTime, you pick an address or a spot on the map and select the desired diameter of the location. You also choose whether you want notification when the child enters the area (check in) or when the child leaves (check out). The similar feature in Kaspersky goes even farther, letting you define a schedule for when the child should be inside a geofenced area. However, it doesn't keep a location history.

Finally, clicking Toggle Alerts simply lets you turn alerts for each of the three Watchlist types on or off.

Hands On with Xnspy I installed Xnspy on a Nexus 9 for testing. I added the local library to the places Watchlist, because it has free Wi-Fi. My Android test devices are tablets, so they have no cellular data; Wi-Fi is essential. I drove to the library, did some Web surfing, and came back.

I did indeed receive an alert that my "child" had entered the library. I was pleased to find that Xnspy also flagged several locations along the way. FamilyTime's geofencing works only when the device has a continuous connection; FamiloopFamiloop Safeguard (for Android) and Kaspersky have no such limitation.

Naturally I didn't have any phone or SMS logs to review, and Gmail capture is only available on a rooted device, but Xnspy did display a list of contacts. I thought at first it was seriously incomplete, until I realized that clicking an icon at the bottom of the list would load more names. The names came up in no specific order, not alphabetic, not by date of last message. Finding a specific name in this list could be tough.

Clicking Internet History correctly listed URL history for the device, starting with the most recent. Each URL appeared as a link, making it easy for a parent to click through and check out the site. Xnspy also captured appointments from the calendar. As noted, capture of messages and calls from third-party apps is a root-only feature, so I didn't see any of those.

I was pleased to see that the apps list included only user-installed apps. FamilyTime lists every single app including preinstalled and system apps, which is awkward. Like Norton, ESET Parental Control (for Android), Net Nanny (for Android), and others, Xnspy lets you block apps from launching. If you do try to block an app, Xnspy does warn that doing so will blow your cover. No more stealth mode when your child sees that big red warning screen!

Kaspersky only lists apps that have been launched during its monitoring. Net Nanny lists all apps, like Xnspy, and can also block access to the App Store, or block all new apps until parental approval.

Xnspy captured photos from the device's own photo gallery, and would have also grabbed photos from WhatsApp, Viber, and Instagram, if I had any. The display was a bit odd, with landscape-mode photos partially doubled up to fit a portrait-mode rectangle. There's a trash-can icon to delete photos, which seemed like a great idea to me. Maybe your child has taken some nude shots for sexting; let's wipe those out! Unfortunately, it only deletes the photo from Xnspy's report, not from the device.

I found that Xnspy doesn't include a video player. In order to view captured videos, I had to save a local copy.

Want to really play secret agent? Under Remote Control in the online console, click Record Surround and enter the number of minutes you'd like to record. This turns on the device's microphone in stealth mode and records whatever is going on around it. I couldn't test the related Call Recording feature, because my Android device isn't a phone. There's no audio player in the console, so you must download a local copy of either type of recording when you want to listen.

Sixty Ways to Blow Your Cover As noted, if you use Xnspy's app-blocking feature your cover is blown. No more stealth. The Remote Control page has a few other options that could well blow your cover.

The Wipe Phone command does just what it says. It wipes out all data on the phone irreversibly. I suppose you might want to do that if your kid is using the phone for something outrageous. You might not even take the blame. It could be some kind of glitch, right?

Clicking Lock Phone lets you remotely change the device's lockscreen protection to use a password of your choice. As far as I could tell, it doesn't take effect until the next time the device has to be unlocked. If your child has been using a swipe pattern or PIN to log in, seeing the password screen instead will be a shock. But even this need not blow your cover. You could offer to help, fiddle with the device, enter the password, and claim to have hacked it.

When you lock a device using FamilyTime, the child sees very clearly what you've done. The icons that let the child request a ride home or send an SOS message still work on the FamilyTime lockscreen.

If You Root ItOn an iOS device, Xnspy is effectively two different products, one for jailbroken devices and one for safe devices. The Android edition isn't nearly as separate. Rooting the device does enable you to snap remote screenshots, which appear in the Dashboard under Photos.

The other thing you get on a rooted phone is the ability to monitor calls, messages, and (in some cases) contacts for a variety of third-party communication apps. Specifically, it tracks Facebook, Gmail, Kik, Line, Skype, Viber Calls, and WhatsApp.

Powerful but Pricey Xnspy (for Android) doesn't include the content filtering or Internet time control found in many similar apps, but it does track a ton of different activities on your child's mobile device. Its geofencing proved particularly effective. However, it's really hard to get past that price. It's not just that it's three times as expensive as Norton, it's that you get so much less. With Norton you can cover any number of children on any number of devices. Xnspy covers one child, one device.

Norton Family Parental Control (for Android) does almost everything Xnspy does (it has location tracking, but lacks geofencing) and more. It's our Editors' Choice for Android parental control.

About the Author

Neil Rubenking served as vice president and president of the San Francisco PC User Group for three years when the IBM PC was brand new. He was present at the formation of the Association of Shareware Professionals, and served on its board of directors. In 1986, PC Magazine brought Neil on board to handle the torrent of Turbo Pascal tips submitted b... See Full Bio

Xnspy (for Android)

Xnspy (for Android)

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